Strangers: God’s Gift

Pentecost 14 + Hebrews 13:1-8; Luke 14:1, 7-14 + August 29, 2010
Plymouth United Church of Christ, Milwaukee

I stepped out of the customs and biosecurity area into the early morning light filling the arrivals hall.  There I was: embarking on the first segment of an internship in Auckland, New Zealand.  I had exchanged dozens of e-mails with the minister by this point, and he was picking me up from the airport on a brief trip there prior to my time in Australia last November so I could meet and be introduced to the church community.

As I walked into the arrivals hall, I was filled with the apprehension that had been present in different ways, that I think any stranger in a foreign land experiences.  What if I make a cultural mistake?  What if I get lost – not just simply lost, but off-the-map, better-have-a-GPS-locator to summon the helicopter lost?  What if they don’t like me, or I don’t like them?  What if I don’t recognize the minister or he me from Facebook photos and I’m stuck at the airport for three days?

Ultimately, those dozens of e-mails are the only thing that connected us.  We were still strangers at that point – he a representative of a strange and foreign land to me, and me to him.  Yet Christian hospitality grew between us as he drove me from the airport to his home, and from there on a three-day tour of a community and place that today seems much less foreign to me, and instead much more like a second home.

Let us pray,

O God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts here in this place be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength forever. Amen.

Once again in June, I found myself making that same journey out into the arrivals hall.  The minister was picking me up from the airport, but this time around I would be in New Zealand for the next two months.  He drove me to the home of a family in the congregation for whom I would be housesitting for the first half of my time, as they were vacationing in England for three weeks.  After some time I had settled in and decided to go explore the neighborhood.

At the top of the driveway was a dairy – New Zealand’s term for a convenience store – and I stopped in to grab a little snack.  I wasn’t really hungry at that point, but I felt like a bag of potato chips or some other small thing would be good for my walk.  I settled on a candy bar and went up to the cash register.

Right under the display was a handwritten sign, “Cash or EFTPOS only, no credit.”  Oops.  I hadn’t gone to the ATM yet.  No candy bar for me.  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said to the clerk.  “Do you know where an ATM is nearby?”

She told me where it was, then asked where I was staying and for how long I’d be in the country.  I responded, and she then proceeded to tell me to just take the candy bar and stop back with the $2 next time I walked past the store.

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

The Hebrews author lived in a time when the Christian community was very unlike that which we experience in our society today.  Christians existed within a culture that was at best indifferent to their existence, and at worst openly, violently hostile.  Hebrews is a pastoral letter to a community very much on the margins of society, giving the believers an encouraging word to stand strong and hold on.

At the beginning of the passage, the author focuses our attention as being agents of continuing mutual love.  The word used here, philadelphia, is a specific kind of love – as that which exists between brothers and sisters in family.  In using this particular word, the author is first stating that the Christian community is like a family and we are encouraged to nurture and strengthen familial bonds.

The emphasis quickly moves, however, to outward expression.  As Christians then and now, we are not called to be members of some walled-off tribe, but instead to be people who demonstrate love through radical hospitality.

In the first century, when this text was written, hospitality was a very practical virtue, not something attributed to higher reasoning or ethereal meaning.  There were no Holiday Inns, Best Westerns, or Super 8s.  Hostelling International didn’t exist to certify bunkhouses.  Inns were facilities of ill repute.  Demonstrating hospitality – that is, paying attention to and caring for the needs of the stranger – had very tangible implications.

Our circumstances may be different, but the importance of being welcoming, inviting, encouraging, attentive to strangers at all times remains true today.  If mutual love as between family – philadelphia – is our mark of family in lieu of physical similarities or biological realities, then demonstrating that same love toward strangers is the simple way in which we express ourselves.

And so it is that I came to experience hospitality as a stranger in a strange land.  It was easy to identify signs of hospitality specifically among the larger things: having my accommodation provided, access to private vehicles for transportation, the clerk in the store on my first day.  But it becomes humbling when that same spirit manifests itself in smaller ways that only after the fact I’m able to identify: people calling me on my cell phone to check on my well-being, invitations to dinners, daytrips to rural areas outside of the Auckland region, cards and notes of encouragement I continue to receive.

How do we demonstrate hospitality and to whom?  What is our role in the larger discussion of poverty and homelessness in Milwaukee and beyond?  How do we demonstrate our commitment to hospitality in light of an era marked by Arizona-style immigration laws and stubbornly excessive deportation rates?  What is our place in welcoming new people into our neighborhoods, our church, and the other communities of our everyday lives?

That’s the thing with radical hospitality.  It’s radical.  In a world and society that is becoming increasingly individualistic – iPods and personal music players, single-driver automobiles, online shopping, OnDemand TV channels and Hulu – it takes a bit of counter-cultural effort to break the trend and live a life of hospitality.  To base it in the motivation of seeing each stranger as a potential messenger of God is simply divine, indeed.

I’m challenged to consider how often I immediately respond to strangers as being angels, messengers of God, as well.  The first verse in the passage from Hebrews focuses on mutual love and moves into talk of strangers.  Is the author taking for granted the assumption that strangers demonstrate love and we are the ones who are not responding in-kind?  Jo Bailey Wells offers a different definition of stranger from the normal definition of simply being a person one does not know.  Instead she offers, “anyone in whom I have yet to recognize God’s gift.”

“On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.”

The people who assembled themselves for the banquet recorded in Luke are masters at the art of strategic entertaining.  Such banquets are places to see and be seen, and the host is a champion of fundraising and self-interest.  In due course, the host would likely receive tangible reward on his calculated social hospitality investment.

In Jesus’ parable, he uses the example of a person who sought out a higher place at the table but then was humiliated when someone of a higher stature came along and took that spot.  It’s far better – for social reasons, saving face and all – to sit at a lesser spot and be invited to a place of prominence by the host.  This sense of humility he promotes is very unique to the Christian community in the early Greco-Roman world, when such actions were considered far from virtuous in the wider society.  It fits in with Jesus’ teaching throughout the gospels and across the New Testament witness.

But this is an example where Jesus challenges the norm.  Certainly Jesus himself is, at least in some way, a stranger to the Pharisees – but not a stranger in whom God’s gift is being sought or recognized.  Instead Jesus refocuses our ears and minds on those who break the cycle of reciprocation.  Mutuality, instead, is a form of blessing and an experience of God’s grace.

Jesus does not challenge the norm of seats of honor at banquets; indeed his answer assumes such a structure.  What he challenges instead are those who are invited and the subsequent social response.  Instead of inviting family, friends, the rich and powerful, the connected, to meals – he encourages hosts to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.”  In other words, invite those who are unable to repay the favor.

Our games we play with status are revealed in these passages.  In Hebrews, the author is speaking directly to us, and we are left to assume that we are the ones with something to offer, that we are the ones who are rich.  We are responsible for welcoming the stranger and recognizing their blessing.

But mutuality is a two-way street.  We can’t always be the host, and our privilege mustn’t always be what we rely upon.  Without both providing and receiving hospitality, we fail to complete the full exchange, expressing the truest mutuality.  In receiving the stranger our own lives and experiences are expanded, as well.

While I was in New Zealand, there were many situations where I was the stranger, but there were also a few times when I had the opportunity to act as host.  As people came through the community center during the week, I would take the time to talk briefly with them, to offer a cup of tea as they might be waiting for their next engagement.  At the end of my time, I offered a small gift and meal to my host family as an expression of my appreciation.  Sharing my experiences of church, education, and life in the United States in various conversations was also an opportunity to act as host in a small way.

Living in the tension of host and guest is a bit like what God is doing in today’s story: the creator of the universe and host of the heavenly banquet becoming guest at the Pharisee’s home for dinner.

We are called to express radical hospitality in what we do not simply because it’s nice, but because God’s grace transforms and empowers us.  We are called to experience radical hospitality and humble ourselves not simply because it’s polite, but because God’s grace is something we can never earn or repay.

Soli Deo Gloria.  To God alone be glory.  Amen.